Why Korea?
Korea, located at the heart of Northeast Asia, is emerging as the global hub for international business in Asia leading the IT and AI industries of the world.
Leader of IT & AI
Korea, home of Samsung, LG, Kia, SK, Hyundai, and Hanwha, ranks first in industrial competitiveness in such industries as smartphones, semiconductors (DRAM), display panels, and shipbuilding. Korea's competitiveness has prompted Facebook to choose Korea recently as the location of its first business hub in Asia.
According to the Global Innovation Index for 2025 published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Korea ranks the 4th place, leading globally in the Human capital and research section, and ranks among the top three worldwide for Researchers (2nd), Overall R&D expenditure (2nd), R&D performed by business (1st), Researchers in businesses (1st), and PCT patents by inventor origin (3rd).
Korea is the world's largest wireless communication device producer, the home of industry giant Samsung, advancing the world's ICT industry as a global smartphone market leader. In the third quarter of 2025, Samsung led the global smartphone market by shipments with a 19% share, while Apple had a 17% share.
Korea is also a leading exporter of cutting-edge electronics products. Samsung was the top brand in 2024 with a 28.3% global market share and has maintained this position for 19 consecutive years. LG's global market share was 10.7% in the first quarter of 2025. LG holds the leading position with a 52.4% share of global OLED TV shipments in 2024, marking its 12th consecutive year at the top, while Samsung had a 27.3% market share in the OLED TV market in 2024.
Korea is best known for having the world's best digital infrastructure. Korea has the cheapest and fastest broadband in the world and is famous for its internet connectivity: 99.96% of Korean households have access to broadband internet, the highest level in the world. Korea also leads in high-speed internet, particularly fiber-optic connections. Korea has the world's fastest average internet connection speed, five times faster than the world average and more than twice as fast as that of the United States. Currently, 99.98% of Korean households have access to mobile internet. Korea has further upgraded its wireless network to 5G: Korea was one of the first countries to launch commercial 5G services in 2019 and now has a large number of 5G subscribers with a 43.8% penetration rate following the US and Netherlands.
When it comes to internet broadband, Korea excels in terms of speed and quality, adoption, price, and the key social indicators of literacy and gender equality. The great success of its wireless broadband industry is driven by multiple factors, including government planning, healthy competition, urban population density, private-sector growth, and aspects of Korean culture.
Behind Korea's IT success is the Korean government's effort to build a nation-wide information infrastructure. In 1995, the Korean government initiated the Korean Information Infrastructure Project, a 10-year program that began by building an internet infrastructure between government buildings and then rolled out country-wide broadband by 1998.
In 1999, the Korean government implemented a program known as Cyber Korea 21, which sought to accelerate IT development by providing millions of dollars in loans and funding to develop regional IT infrastructures across the nation, along with providing internet literacy education to the general public. Today, about 99.96% of Koreans have access to the internet thanks to these infrastructure and education initiatives and subsequent IT industry investments. Currently, the Korean government leads and supports various IT-related projects to build infrastructure and promote IT capacity and use. As a result, public Wi-Fi is widely available in public spaces such as cafes, restaurants, hospitals, airports, and public transportation. Korea is further rapidly adopting the latest Wi-Fi 7 standard, with initial rollouts in homes and public transport.
In addition, the Korean government is aggressively pursuing AI development through investment and strategic policies led by the Ministry of Science and ICT as well as talent development by supporting universities to cultivate AI talent. The Korean government is investing billions into AI and AI semiconductor programs with a $6.9 billion commitment by 2027. Korea is leading the AI sector with collaborating with NVIDIA. NVIDIA announced that it is working with South Korea to expand the nation's AI infrastructure with over a quarter-million NVIDIA GPUs across its sovereign clouds and AI factories with closely teaming with industry titans, such as Samsung Electronics, SK Group, Hyundai Motor Group and Naver Cloud.
According to NVIDIA, Samsung Electronics is building an AI factory with over 50,000 GPUs to accelerate its AI, semiconductor and digital transformation roadmap. SK Group is building an AI factory featuring over 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs and Asia's first industrial AI cloud featuring NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs for physical AI and robotics workloads. Hyundai Motor Group is collaborating with NVIDIA and the Korean government in building an NVIDIA AI factory with 50,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs to enable integrated AI model training, validation and deployment for manufacturing and autonomous driving. NAVER Cloud is expanding its NVIDIA AI infrastructure with over 60,000 GPUs for enterprise and physical AI workloads.
Korean Culture and the Market
Korean culture is characterized by groupness and collectivity, emphasizing the social values of harmony and mutual growth. Further, the culture's Confucian work ethic influences Korean workplaces, leading the nation toward a desirable model of collective gain and harmonious, balanced economic growth.
Korea's culture, media, and entertainment industries are admired around the world. Thanks to the popularity of Korean pop culture (known as "Hanryu" or "Korean Wave"), manifested in Korean drama, Korean cinema, and K-pop music, Korea has exercised its "soft" power and expanded its influence across East, South, and Southeast Asia. The Korean government has supported such cultural industries by offering subsidies and funding for start-ups, contributing to the rapid growth of Korean pop culture to become the world's leading exporter of culture.
Furthermore, as demonstrated by the global mega-hit "Gangnam Style" by the Korean singer Psy and global fame by famous K-pop groups, BTS and BlackPink, social networking systems have promoted a global boom in Korean culture in such areas as fashion, music, television, games, cuisine, cartoons, and beauty products. Currently, Korea is home to the World Cyber Games, the world's largest video game competition, with three television channels fully dedicated to eSports and featuring professional gamers. New and talented Korean start-ups are also leading the digital media and service industry thanks to government-led investment and guidance.
In sum, Korean culture is fascinating. Yet, Koreans are highly sensitive to a change of trend or fad that a different approach is needed to penetrate and operate successfully in the Korean market. Many global multinationals have tried to operate in the Korean market yet failure case studies show that multinationals are not sensitive to cultural factors that determine the success of the global operation. A good case is the story of Blue Bottle, a premium coffee maker from the US. Blue Bottle failed in the Korean market as it ignored the cultural behaviors of Koreans: BB eliminated all sockets and Wifi-service from stores to keep its classy modern interior, which totally ignored cultural behaviors of Korean consumers failing to adapt to Korean culture that is highly technology-oriented and digitalized.